1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of separately feeding a print medium sheet, for example, a paper sheet, from a pile of such separate print medium sheets, to an image-forming area in an image-forming apparatus such as a printer, a duplicator, and to an apparatus for carrying out this method.
2. Description of the Related Art
When paper sheets are separately fed from a cassette box, containing such paper sheets, to an image-forming area to form an image on the paper sheet, each sheet is in contact with a pair of stopping feed rollers and an advance of the sheet is stopped, and at this stage a skew of the sheet is corrected before the pair of feed rollers are rotated by a signal for starting to form an image on the sheet. Namely, as shown in FIG. 7, when a paper sheet P is fed by a pair of feed rollers 28a, 28b while another pair of feed rollers 30, 47, are stopped, the paper sheet P is brought into contact with the feed rollers 30, 47 which are not rotating and is rotated in the direction of the arrow al, and thus a skew thereof is corrected.
In the above-mentioned method, however, a space between two pairs of feed rollers must be large, to allow the skew of the paper sheet P to be corrected in that space, and thus the size of the image-forming apparatus must be relatively large, to enable a proper correction of a large skew of the sheet. Furthermore, when using multistage cassette boxes, the control method of separately feeding the sheets must be complex because a length of a path for feeding a sheet from each cassette box to the pair of feed rollers which are not rotating differs from each other so that the amount of scatter of each excess feed amount for the correction of the skew of the sheet determined by a calculation owing to a slip of the sheet in actual feed of the sheet becomes large.